It was, however, Donald Trump who delivered the coup de grà ce. Right after his inauguration, he curtailed trade talks with Europe and withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, saying: "We're going to stop the ridiculous trade deals that have taken" companies out of our country, and it's going to be reversed."
Unilateral Foreign Policy
Trump would instead adopt a unilateral America First strategy that soon sparked a costly trade war with China. After two years of escalating tariffs on both sides of the Pacific that damaged the U.S. economy, Trump capitulated in January 2020, signing an agreement that rescinded the most prohibitive U.S. duties in exchange for Beijing's unenforceable promise to buy more American goods. The president then hailed his "big, beautiful" trade deal as a great victory, even though it was nothing less than an ill-concealed surrender.
While his White House seemed obsessed with gaming its bilateral ties with China, Beijing was stealing a page right out of Obama's strategic global playbook, outmaneuvering Washington by pursuing two multilateral trade agreements that should have seemed eerily familiar to anyone who lived through the Obama years. In November 2020, Beijing would lead 15 Asia-Pacific nations in signing a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership that promised to create the world's largest free-trade zone, encompassing 2.2 billion people and nearly a third of the global economy.
Just a month later, China's President Xi Jinping scored what one expert called "a geopolitical coup" by signing a landmark agreement with European Union leaders for the closer integration of their financial services. In effect, the accord gives European banks easier access to the Chinese market, while drawing the continent more closely into Beijing's orbit. So serious is the shift away from Washington that President Biden's incoming National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan publicly urged the NATO allies to first consult with the new administration before signing onto the deal a plea they simply ignored. Indeed, this treaty is arguably the biggest breach in the NATO alliance since that mutual defense pact was formed more than 70 years ago.
Through a stunning inversion of Obama's bold yet unrealized geopolitical gambit of using multilateral pacts to draw Eurasia's trade toward America, those two agreements will give China preferential access to nearly half of all world trade (without even factoring in the still-developing Belt and Road project). In a diplomatic masterstroke, Bejing exploited Trump's absence from the international arena to negotiate agreements that could, along with that Belt and Road Initiative, steer a growing share of the Eurasian continent's capital and commerce toward China. In the years to come, Beijing's inclusiveness could well mean Washington's exclusion from much of the burgeoning trade that will continue to make Eurasia the epicenter of global economics.
The Decline and Fall of You-Know-Which Great Power
If that were all, then we could chalk up a few significant wins for China and just wait for Biden's foreign-policy team to try to even the score. But there's far more happening that suggests those treaties were a clear manifestation of deeper, more troubling trends.
When empires decline and fall, they seldom collapse in the sort of sudden apocalypse portrayed in a monumental series of paintings entitled "The Course of Empire" by another denizen of the Catskill Mountains, the renowned artist Thomas Cole. His 1836 painting in that series, now appropriately enough hung at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, shows a "savage enemy" plundering a grand imperial capital whose inhabitants, debased by years of luxurious living, can only flee in terror while women are raped and buildings burn.
Thomas Cole, "The Course of Empire: Destruction." Click here to expand.Empires, however, usually experience a long, less dramatic decline before they fall in the Roman fashion, thanks to events whose logic only becomes apparent years or even decades later, as historians try to sort through the rubble. So it's likely to be in what, until mid-last week, was (and still in many ways remains) Donald Trump's America, where the signs of decline are as erratic as they are omnipresent.
The most telling harbinger of that decline, Trump himself, is now in exile at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida. Ten years ago in an essay for TomDispatch entitled "Four Scenarios for the End of the American Century by 2025," I suggested that U.S. global hegemony would end not with Thomas Cole's apocalyptic bang, but instead with the whimper of empty populist rhetoric. "Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair," I wrote in December 2010, "a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence."
Trump's election in 2016 made all too real what, until then, had only seemed to me a troubling possibility. With a legerdemain worthy of that nineteenth-century showman P.T. Barnum's bag of bunkum (like the supposed Cardiff Giant or the Fiji Island Mermaid), Trump's TV show "The Apprentice" presented The Donald as a self-made billionaire of extraordinary financial savvy. Who better to rescue America from the job losses, stagnant wages, and foreign competition brought on by economic globalization? But Trump had cheated his way into an Ivy League college; many of his businesses had gone bankrupt; and his much-vaunted entrepreneurial flair came down essentially to frittering away a $400 million inheritance from his father. As journalist H.L. Mencken predicted back in 1920, America had finally come to the point where "the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
Once in office, Trump soon bent the nation (but not the world) to his will, rupturing time-tested alliances, tearing up treaties, denying incontrovertible climate science, and demanding respect for American authority with a thundering, if largely empty, rhetoric that threatened military retaliation or economic reprisals globally. Despite his manifestly inane policies, the Republican Party capitulated, corporate tycoons applauded, and nearly half the American public cleaved to their new-found savior.
As with all sell-out shows, the best was saved for last. When the Covid-19 pandemic struck with full force in March 2020, Trump turned up at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, donning a MAGA hat, to proclaim his "natural ability" when it came to medical science, while distinguished doctors stood by like studio extras in mute testimony to his otherwise risible claims. As the pandemic began climbing toward its terrible, still developing toll, Trump hijacked White House briefings by medical experts to promote a succession of crackpot claims wearing a mask was merely "politically correct"; Covid-19 was just another flu that "becomes weaker with warmer weather"; hydroxychloroquine was a cure; and shining ultraviolet "light inside of the body" or injecting "disinfectant" were possible treatments. A surprising number of Americans started drinking bleach to protect themselves from the virus, forcing months of public-health warnings.
After nearly a century in which the United States had been a world leader in promoting public health, the Trump administration, to escape blame for its own escalating failures, walked out of the World Health Organization. Lending the country the aura of a failed state, the CDC itself, once the world's gold standard in medical research, bungled the development of a coronavirus test and so forfeited any serious, nationwide attempt to successfully track and trace the disease (the most effective means of its control).
While smaller nations like New Zealand, South Korea, and even impoverished Rwanda effectively curbed Covid-19, by the end of Trump's term the U.S. already had experienced more than 400,000 deaths and 24 million infections significantly above any other developed nation and a full quarter of the world's total cases. Meanwhile, Beijing mobilized a rigorous public-health campaign that quickly contained the virus to just 4,600 deaths in a population of 1.4 billion. In only four months, China virtually eliminated the virus (despite periodic new local breakouts) and had its economy humming along with a 5% increase in gross domestic product, which accounted for 30% of global growth last year. Meanwhile, after 11 months of an incessant pandemic, the U.S. remained mired in a crippling recession. This striking disparity in state performance only accelerated China's quest to surpass the U.S. as the world's largest economy and, with all that financial clout, become its preeminent power.
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